Dear Commission B National Representatives,

As I believe you are all aware of, the end of the URSI General Assemblies is the time when the new Commission chairs ( and many other URSI officers ) begin their three year terms. It will be my great pleasure and honour to serve as Commission B chair during the next triennium. As you also know, in this capacity I succeed Chalmers Butler whose very successful and dedicated work will be very hard to match. Of course, we want Chalmers to continue to be involved in Commission B matters and I am sure that I will need to draw on his vast experience on many occasions to come.

As a result of a vote among the National Representatives that was completed at the Toronto GA, Prof. Makoto Ando, Tokyo Institute of Technology, will serve as Commission B vice-chair during the next triennium ( and continue as chair during the triennium thereafter )

I am very much looking forward to working closely together with him.

One important purpose of this letter is to establish contact with all of you. Undoubtedly e-mail will be the most convenient way of communicating and I have e-mail addresses for the great majority of you ( as listed in the Dec.'98 issue of Radio Science Bulletin (RSB)). For some of you I have only a fax number or a postal address, and those will get a hard copy through the relevant means. I ask everyone to confirm that you have received this message and please let me know about updates that I have missed. Two obvious responsibilities of the Commission B chair are: first to create a scientific programme for the next Electromagnetic Theory Symposium (EMTS),i.e. the one in Victoria, Canada, in 2001, that is as relevant and attractive as is at all possible, and second: to do the same concerning the Commission B part of the scientific programme of the next GA in Maastricht, The Netherlands, in 2002. However, I think that we should also look beyond what is directly related to those events and see what Commission B, from its very central position in URSI, can do to further promote radio science internationally. Please let me know what your thoughts are on this! The preparations for the EMTS in Victoria, May 13-17, 2001, are already under way and a Local Organising Committee (LOC), chaired by Prof. Jens Bornemann, Univ. of Victoria, has been formed. Choosing the Technical Programme Committee (TPC) comes next.

Already before the Toronto GA, Chalmers Butler received inquiries from several groups of people who wanted to host the 2004 EMTS. Since a vote concerning a large number of offers by successive elimination is a time-consuming process, Commission B decided in Toronto, at Chalmers Butler's suggestion, that a committee should be formed to take a look at the offers and identify the two offers that in their opinion are the most attractive ones. Then the National Representatives would decide, in a single vote, which of the two they prefer. In order for this committee to be able to make a well-founded choice of the two candidates, it is clearly desirable that the info they have from the proposers is similar in nature. In the near future I will come back to this question and invite offers ( of a partly standardised format )for hosting the EMTS in 2004. The vote could then probably take place early in 2000, leaving the host chosen ample time for preparations.

So, I believe this will be enough for today. Please let me hear from you!

Best wishes, Staffan Ström.